Yankees baseball is back. Real, meaningful baseball. For the first time since lying down to a fatigued Blue Jays bullpen for nine innings to save their season 168 days ago, the Yankees will play their first game of 2026 on Wednesday.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the 2026 Yankees. It’s hard to be anything more than that when you return the same roster that was humiliated in the ALDS and the same manager who has overseen enormous failures and disappointments.

With the Yankees opening the season on Wednesday night in San Francisco, let’s get ready for the season with questions and comments from readers.

Is Grichuk and his right-handed bat a lock to be the fourth outfielder over Dominguez? – Rich

Rich asked this question last week before the roster had been determined. But as we all know now, Randal Grichuk is a Yankee and Dominguez is a RailRider.

I’m fine with Grichuk being a Yankee because it means he can’t play against the Yankees. Grichuk has an .825 OPS against the Yankees in his career. It’s why he has been a staple on my All-Animosity Team in recent years. Even last year when he had a down year and was playing for the Diamondbacks in the NL West, he still managed to win a game against the Yankees with a big, late-game double at Yankee Stadium in the first week of April. Grichuk owes Yankees fans a lot of big hits for all of the big hits he recorded against them in his career.

The Dominguez decision is depressing. I didn’t want Trent Grisham back and the Yankees either offered him the qualifying offer because they thought he wouldn’t accept it or because they were that worried Cody Bellinger would leave as a free agent. Grisham accepted it and Bellinger re-signed and Dominguez is the odd man out.

There’s a better chance Hal Steinbrenner goes against the idea of a salary cap when the current CBA expires than there is that Grisham hits 34 home runs again this season. Grisham had never hit more than 17 home runs in a season before last season and now the Yankees are clogging up a developmental lane for Dominguez (or Spencer Jones) with a player with a .720 career OPS. The Yankees have screwed up the development of their former top prospect in Dominguez as he is the latest Yankees prospect to be too good to trade, but not good enough to play for them.

When the Yankees want to give a top prospect a real chance they will stop at nothing to do so like they have with Anthony Volpe. If Volpe had Dominguez’s slash line last year of .257/.331/.388 there would already be a spot roped off for Volpe’s number 11 in Monument Park. I fully expect the Yankees to trade Dominguez and for him to realize his potential elsewhere.

How long will the leash be on Trent Grisham? – Mark

Look at how the Yankees have treated other high-priced veterans deserving of losing playing time to know how long Grisham’s leash will be. Grisham is making a lot of money in 2026 and will be given an unbelievably long leash. No matter how bad things get, Cashman and Boone will tell us he’s close and that the player who hit 34 home runs last season is in there, even if Grisham’s next-best full season is half of that total. Grisham could have a .600 OPS come the first week of May and he will still be leading off against righties. It will take a lot for him to become what he should be in a fourth outfielder.

I noticed in the international tournament that just went on that and some of the bigger games and crucial situations that Judge didn’t rise to the occasion? Am I being over critical? – Paul

You’re only being overly critical in that the World Baseball Classic is a meaningless tournament in which players play for countries they have the loosest of ties to and pitchers like Ryan Yarbrough are on Team USA. If the tournament mattered or meant something, Team USA would field an unbeatable team.

As for Judge, Americans who aren’t Yankees fans got to see what Judge does in the biggest of games, even if this time in came in March instead of October. I was at the Stadium in October when he hit the mammoth, three-run, game-tying home run in Game 3 of the ALDS, and while it was a great moment, it happened in Game 3 of the ALDS — 10 wins away from a championship. It was Judge’s at-bat in Game 1 of the ALDS that completely changed the series and his Game 3 home run ended up prolonging the season by a day before the offense was embarrassed by a fatigued Blue Jays bullpen game. Judge is a .294/.413/.615 hitter in the regular season and a .236/.346/.476 hitter in the postseason. The best postseason players have an equal or better OPS in the playoffs compared to the regular season and Judge’s postseason OPS is 200 points under his regular-season OPS.

It’s right in front of us. We turned the page on 2025. Hopefully we win the East and trounce the Dodgers in the World Series. – Dave

Sadly, we didn’t turn the page on 2025. There is nothing different about the end of the 2025 season and the start of the 2026 season. A few months without baseball didn’t make this roster better at baseball. The start of 2026 is just a continuation of the end of 2025. The Yankees made that so when they decided to bring back the same not-good-enough roster and then had the balls to tell everyone it’s not the same roster. Though that part shouldn’t come as a surprise since the Yankees have been spewing “championship-caliber” bullshit for years, believe internally that they won the 2017 World Series, continue to operate with the same manager and general manager and have an owner who said this winter that the franchise with the highest valuation in the sport (and possibly all sports if put up for sale) doesn’t turn a profit.

When do we replace 27 time world champion on the backstop with insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? – WasWatching

If this change was going to happen, doing it after the 2021 season would have made the most sense.

Is there enough depth with both pitching and hitting given the age of the roster and injury history? – Michael

The depth of the team is Judge. If Judge goes down, the season goes down. It seems impossible that a baseball team and a $325 million roster could be so reliant on one single player, but the Yankees are. Not only is the roster built in a way that the entire season hinges on Judge’s health, but it also hinges on him playing at an MVP level. Judge can’t just be a superstar. He has to be an all-time great for the Yankees to get to where they want to go.

The Yankees do have pitching depth, but no team seems to have pitching depth for long. Carlos Rodon and then Gerrit Cole are expected back and while that sounds awesome, they both need to stay healthy and have no setbacks and then the starters that are available as of now need to stay healthy as well. The good news is Marcus Stroman and Carlos Carrasco aren’t making up 40 percent of the Opening Day rotation.

Luis Gil is currently the fifth starter and because the Yankees won’t need a fifth starter until mid-April, he won’t start the season in the majors. That’s problematic because Gil won the 2024 Rookie of the Year and started the only game the Yankees won in the 2024 World Series and then they made him untouchable last season. He followed up being untouchable by missing nearly the entire regular season and then pooped his pants on the mound at Rogers Centre in the ALDS. Now he’s behind Will Warren and Ryan Weathers in the starting pitching pecking order.

Same team, a year older, less wins. Predict 86 wins. – Tyler

In full season since 1995 the Yankees have failed to win at least 86 games only four times. Those four times are … 

2013 when Lyle Overbay (142 games), Vernon Wells (130), Chris Stewart (109), Eduardo Nunez (90), Jayson Nix (87) and Travis Hafter (82) played in the most games after Robinson Cano, 39-year-old Ichiro Suzuki and Brett Gardner …

2014 when Brian Cashman built an infield of 40-year-old Derek Jeter, .711 OPS Mark Teixeira, 36-year-old Brian Roberts and Yangervis Solarte …

2016 when not a single one of the nine players with the most games played at their position finished the season as a league-average hitter and the team sold at the deadline …

and 2023, when the Yankees posted their lowest full-season win total in 31 years and then brought back the manager who led the team to that three-decade-low win total.

(Joe Girardi deserves to be in the Hall of Fame for posting winning seasons with the 2013, 2014 and 2016 rosters).

A lot would have to go wrong for the Yankees to not win more than 86 games in 2026. Last season, they mailed in one-third of the season (like they always do under Boone) and won 94 games. I still think this team wins in the mid-90s. But if they don’t a lot of people should lose their jobs (many of whom should have lost them years ago).

Are we ready to put ourselves through this again? – Greg

Yes, we are. Beginning on Wednesday, there will be real Yankees baseball to write and talk about for at least the next six months. But do we know how this season likely ends because we have seen this same season many times now? Highly likely.

I have spent the week violently ill. It hasn’t been the flu. It hasn’t been a virus. It’s nothing antibiotics can treat. It’s been a physical, emotional and mental breakdown as a reaction to the news the Yankees have had trade discussions with the Rangers about Corey Seager.

Four years ago, coming off a season in which the Yankees were the odds-on favorite to win the American League and instead finished third in the division and fifth in the AL with their postseason lasting nine innings and their manager shockingly stating after that embarrassing wild-card loss that the “league has closed the gap on the Yankees” — despite having never won to that point as Yankees manager and still having not won four seasons later — I desperately wanted the Yankees to sign Seager.

By September 2021, Gleyber Torres had played his way off of shortstop and the Yankees were forced to start Andrew Velazquez at short in the one-game playoff at Fenway Park. The Yankees were without a shortstop for 2022 and their misevaluation of thinking Torres could be the long-term answer there had now caused roster construction issues as DJ LeMahieu had been given a six-year, $90 million deal to play second base prior to 2021. Now Torres would move to second and LeMahieu — the former Gold Glove second baseman — would become a third baseman/first baseman hybrid.

Over the course of baseball history — outside of four miserable nights in October 2004 — things have mostly broken in a favorable way for the Yankees, and needing a shortstop in the 2021-22 offseason happened to be the best time to ever need to sign a shortstop through free agency. The Yankees could fill the biggest need on their roster without depleting their farm system. All they would need was money — the resource they generate more of in revenue than every other team in the sport.

A 27-year-old Seager was the best available shortstop. The former Rookie of the Year, two-time All-Star, two-time Silver Slugger and 2020 World Series MVP had posted an .870 OPS in 636 regular-season games with the Dodgers. The prime of his career would match up perfectly with the primes of other star Yankees. Seager was undoubtedly the player to sign that offseason, but even if the Yankees didn’t sign him, there were plenty of other good options.

The Yankees didn’t sign Seager. They didn’t sign any of the alternatives either. The Rangers signed Seager to a $10-year, $325 million deal and added shortstop Marcus Semien on a seven-year, $175 million deal to play second base. The Rangers decided spending half-a-billion dollars on two shortstops and asking one of them to play second base would be better than their in-house option. Their in-house option was Isiah Kiner-Falefa and the Rangers traded him to the Twins. The Twins didn’t really want Kiner-Falefa, but they also lacked a shortstop and weren’t certain they would be able to sign any of the free agents because of their massive remaining commitment to Josh Donaldson of two years and $50 million. The Twins would need to find a team dumb enough to want Kiner-Falefa so badly they would take on the $50 million owed to Donaldson as well.

The Yankees traded Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela to the Twins for Kiner-Falefa, Donaldson and his $50 million, and Ben Rortvedt, who would go on to post a negative WAR in 32 games with the Yankees. The Twins, now free of Donaldson’s contract, turned around and gave the money they saved on Donaldson to Carlos Correa. The Yankees were outmuscled by the Rangers financially in the free-agent market and then outsmarted by the Twins in the trade market.

In 2022, Seager was an All-Star and hit 33 home runs and Correa posted an .834 OPS. Kiner-Falefa was 16 percent worse than league average at the plate and a disaster in the field, leading to his eventual benching in the postseason. Donaldson posted career lows in runs, home runs, RBIs, batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and OPS+, culminating in him striking out in 16 of 29 at-bats in the playoffs.

The reason the Yankees chose to not sign Seager or Correa or any of the available free-agent shortstops after 2021 had been a combination of Hal Steinbrenner not wanting to spend more of his inherited money on a business venture he has never wanted to be a part of and because of the organization’s belief in prospects Anthony Volpe and Oswald Peraza. The same baseball operations team and evaluators that believed Torres could play shortstop, that Hicks was worthy of a seven-year extension, didn’t feel the need to even meet with Bryce Harper as a free agent and believed taking on $50 million owed to a 37-year-old Donaldson was wise were being trusted in their assessments of Volpe and Peraza. Once again, they were wrong.

Volpe “won” the starting shortstop job in spring training 2023 because if he showed even a modicum of talent the Yankees were going to give him the job. There was no one else. Peraza’s glove was elite, but his bat was a Quadruple-A bat and there was no way the Yankees could go back to Kiner-Falefa after he was benched for Peraza and Oswaldo Cabrera in October. Volpe won the job for Opening Day, and despite being one of the worst, if not the worst everyday player in the majors since that day, he has never been benched, let alone sent down. Not even when the Yankees traded for Jose Caballero last season and Caballero greatly outplayed Volpe in September did Volpe sit in the postseason. The most recent memory of Volpe on a major-league field was him being pinch-hit for in his final at-bat of the 2025 playoffs, so he could be spared from being booed off his home field yet again after striking out 11 times in 15 at-bats in the ALDS.

In 2023, Volpe provided putrid offense, Kiner-Falefa finished with a 0 WAR and Donaldson was released, only after Aaron Boone spent the offseason calling any Yankees fan who didn’t think Donaldson could still hit “crazy.” The Yankees failed to qualify for the playoffs despite 40 percent of the league getting in and finished with the franchise’s worst record in three decades.

In Texas, Seager led the league in doubles (42), hit 33 home runs for a second straight year, hit .327/.390/.623 with a ridiculous 174 OPS+ and finished second in MVP voting to Shohei Ohtani. Seager then went on to hit .303/.439/.667 in the postseason with an 1.137 OPS in the World Series to win World Series MVP for the second time. He led the Rangers to the first championship in franchise history, helped unseat the Astros as the class of the AL (something the Yankees weren’t able to do) and the lasting image of the 2023 postseason is his monstrous two-run, game-tying home run in the ninth inning of Game 1.

Seager’s 10-year, $325 million contract has already been worth its entire value after four seasons. It was worth it after the first two. His $32.5 million average annual salary is nearly $17 million less than the Yankees paid Marcus Stroman ($18.5 million), DJ LeMahieu ($15 million), Aaron Hicks ($9,785,715) and Anthony Rizzo ($6 million) last season. Stroman gave the Yankees a 6.23 ERA and 72 baserunners in 39 innings, LeMahieu put up a .674 OPS (something Volpe would dream about) and couldn’t get to any ground ball not hit directly at him and Hicks and Rizzo made a combined $15.8 million not to play baseball. (Hicks is receiving another $1 million in 2026 to not play baseball.) His $32.5 million average annual salary is nearly equal to what the Yankees will pay Trent Grisham ($22 million), Paul Goldschmidt ($4 million), Volpe ($3.475 million) and Hicks ($1 million) this year. (I think my favorite thing about the Brian Cashman era has been how many players the Yankees pay to not play baseball at all or pay to play for other teams, and how many players never get another job after leaving the Yankees.)

So yeah, I’m sick over the idea the Yankees are trying to fix a franchise-altering mistake from four years ago that can’t be fixed without a time machine. The Yankees chose to waste prime years of their star, high-priced talent in a win-now window with Kiner-Falefa and then Volpe. Yes, having Seager in 2026 is better than not having Seager in 2026, but the idea of signing him four years ago and giving the Seagers generational wealth for all of time was paying him for his age 28, 29, 30, 31 and 32 seasons and knowing you would have to live with the second half of the contract. A soon-to-be 32-year-old Seager is still better than Volpe or whatever slop the Yankees plan to play at short until George Lombard Jr. is ready (if he’s ever ready and isn’t just another Yankees prospect that flames out), but getting Seager now, four years after the Yankees should have, is sickening.

Anthony Volpe won’t be on the Yankees’ Opening Day roster and will likely be out until May as he rehabs his shoulder following offseason surgery. I have yet to see any Yankees fan anywhere upset that Jose Caballero is going to be the Yankees’ starting shortstop to begin the season, and that’s all you need to know about where the fan base is when it comes to the player the Yankees still believe is going to be a star.

Unfortunately, there’s no chance Volpe will lose his job to Jose Caballero. There’s a better chance Hal Steinbrenner caves to putting an advertisement on the team’s iconic uniform. Oh wait. OK, there’s a better chance Hal Steinbrenner opens the Yankees’ books and lets the public see their profits. Caballero could have a March/April like Aaron Judge had last season (.427/.521/.761) and the moment Volpe comes off the injured list, he’s going right back to being the everyday shortstop. Aaron Boone has been asked if Volpe will go right back to being the everyday shortstop many times since the end of last season and every time he has essentially said he will without saying those exact words.

Boone hasn’t used those exact words because he wants Yankees fans to believe no one’s job is safe and that the idea of playing time based on performance exists within the team. But we all know that is a crock of shit. Just look at last September when the Yankees tried to act as if shortstop was an open competition down the stretch. Caballero played 18 games in September and had an .845 OPS and Volpe played 18 games and had a .534 OPS and Volpe still started every postseason game. He started every game of the ALDS despite going 1-for-15 with 11 strikeouts before mercifully being pinch hit for in the ninth inning of Game 4, so he wouldn’t have to endure being booed off his home field again. Caballero is a placeholder until Volpe is ready and nothing more no matter how well he plays.

“I just can’t wait to go back out there and play and help the team win,” Volpe said this week, though I’m not sure how often he has actually helped the team win over the last three seasons. “If I do that and play the way I know I can play, everything will take care of itself.”

Volpe shouldn’t want to play the way he knows he can play since to this point in his career he’s been 16 percent worse than the major-league average offensively. As for defensively, well who cares (even though he was atrocious defensively last year as well and has seemed to always commit an error in the biggest moments of games throughout his career)? Defensive shortstops grow on trees. If defense at shortstop were all that mattered, Oswald Peraza would be the Yankees’ starting shortstop and not another failed Yankees prospect. 

“I’m not really looking in the past,” Volpe said. “I just get excited about what it could be like when it’s all healed.”

Since Volpe doesn’t want to look in the past, I will do it for him.

Volpe said he felt a “pop” in his shoulder after diving for a ball in the Yankees’ May 3 game against the Rays last season.

“It happened quick and it was scary, but after that, I felt OK and I felt like I had my strength,” Volpe said after that game. “I’ve never really had anything else pop or displace or anything like that, so I have nothing to compare it to.”

Volpe remained in the game and then was sent for X-rays and an MRI, all of which came back as “good news,” Boone said at the time. Volpe was held out of the lineup the next day, but the day after that he went right back to being the Yankees’ everyday shortstop.

Volpe finished the regular season with a .212/.272/.391 slash line and an abysmal .663 OPS. It’s hard to chalk that level of non-major-league-caliber offense up to his shoulder injury, considering the Yankees and he both said he was fine, the Yankees said the imaging looked good and Volpe’s OPS over the previous two years had been .661. In 2025, he produced the most doubles in any of his three seasons, the most RBIs, the fewest strikeouts and the highest slugging percentage. Volpe with an injured shoulder was better than Volpe with a healthy shoulder.

And that’s why I’m not being fooled into thinking this surgery will have resolved some underlying issue that has him much closer to being an all-time Yankees bust rather than the long-term answer at shortstop. He has played in 472 regular-season games and been given 1,886 sad plate appearances with disappointing results, and yet, the Yankees continue to tell you he is going to be a star. I wish they were right. I wish Volpe were to become a star beginning this season. But based on his career performance to date — when healthy or not — there’s absolutely nothing to suggest he’s going to become a star and it takes being a stubborn front office employee of the Yankees or the biggest homer of the team possible to think otherwise.

If the same Volpe from the last three years — the one with the .222/.283/.379 career slash line — is the Volpe we see in 2026, what excuse will the Yankees have then? His shoulder won’t be a valid one since it’s been surgically repaired. Inexperience won’t be a valid one as he will finish the year with around 600 games played and just under 2,500 plate appearances to his name. If Volpe doesn’t produce like a former organizational No. 1 prospect and former No. 3 baseball prospect should in Year 4 it’s hard to believe he ever will. And it’s already hard to believe he ever will.

After wasting years of his prime vouching for his buddies to be his teammates, Aaron Judge seems to have finally realized that losing with your friends isn’t as enjoyable as potentially winning without them. Gone are the days of Judge’s best friends on the field with him as he will have to settle for Rangers and Knicks games to see them instead.

Judge spoke with the media this week at spring training about watching his team idly sit back throughout the offseason and do nothing other than trade for Ryan Weathers and bring back the entire position player roster from last season.

“Early on, it was pretty tough to watch,” Judge said of the Yankees’ lack of an offseason. “I’m like, ‘Man, we’re’ the New York Yankees. Let’s go out there and get the right people, the right pieces to go out there and finish this thing off.”

After sharing his actual feelings on the state of the team that has provided him little help in terms of an elite supporting cast in recent years, the alarm of a decade-plus of Yankees media training went off in his head and Judge swiftly reversed course on his words.

“Once we solidified getting Bellinger back, we’ve got Trent being our center fielder for another year, then we got a guy like Goldy back. … I think we’re in a good spot,” Judge said after calling out his front office and ownership.

When asked about “running it back,” Judge then responded, “I love it.”

“People might have their opinions on it because we didn’t win it all last year and we fell short in the Division Series,” Judge said, “but we get a chance to bring a lot of those guys back … I like our chances.”

So to recap: Judge was upset that the New York Yankees didn’t add the “right people” or the “right pieces” to improve upon their 94-win season. He didn’t like that the team was making smaller moves (like trading for Weathers and signing Amed Rosario) and “it was tough to watch.” But then, after realizing how his comments would be portrayed, Judge said once the Yankees finalized bringing back the same team, he nows think “they’re in a good spot.”

The first half of Judge’s statements are his true feelings and I’m happy he said what he said because if anyone who should be upset within the organization it should be him. He’s the one with the legacy at stake if he finishes his career without a championship. All of the individual awards he has accumulated and the all-time offensive seasons he has put together are nice, but without a single championship (and because his postseason OPS is 206 points lower than his regular-season OPS), he can’t be discussed alongside the Mount Rushmore Yankees.

“We’ll never be satisfied until we go out there and finish it,” Judge said. “No matter the awards — MVPs, All-Stars — that stuff doesn’t matter. What matters is putting New York back on top and putting this organization back where it belongs, which is being the best organization in the game.”

Judge will turn 34 a month into this season and who knows if his age 35 season will be played with the threat of an extended lockout. There’s a very real possibility he could lose next season and more. 2026 is his best chance to win a championship, just as 2025 was, and 2024 before that, and 2023 before that, and so on. Judge has already gone through two cores of teammates and the players and pitchers who were brought in in their mid- and late 20s during his major-league tenure are now in their mid- and late 30s without anything to show for it.

Judge should be pissed that the lineup lacks even an average right-handed bat beside his. He should be pissed at the continued failed development of the organization’s top prospects. He should be livid that a roster that wasn’t good enough last season is the one that’s going to surround him again this season. After hearing him speak this week, it sounds like he is all of those things.

The Yankees last played a game 127 days ago when they bowed out of the ALDS in Game 4 because they couldn’t save their season against a Blue Jays bullpen game. Since then, nothing has happened when it comes to the Yankees, other than trading for Ryan Weathers. The team Yankees fans watched not be good enough all year against the league’s top competition — and then not be good enough in the ALDS — is the same team the Yankees are going into 2026 with. The same team that went 20-31 during the summer, blew an eight-game division lead to the Blue Jays, barely eked out a best-of-3 win against the injury-ravaged Red Sox and then got run out of the postseason by the Blue Jays, culminating in Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and David Ortiz laughing in the faces of the Yankees and their fans on national TV, is back.

There is nothing different about the end of the 2025 season and the start of the 2026 season. A few months without baseball didn’t make this roster better at baseball. The start of 2026 is just a continuation of the end of 2025. The Yankees made that so when they decided to bring back the same not-good-enough roster and then had the balls to tell everyone it’s not the same roster. Though that part shouldn’t come as a surprise since the Yankees have been spewing “championship-caliber” bullshit for years, believe internally that they won the 2017 World Series, continue to operate with the same manager and general manager and have an owner who said this winter that the franchise with the highest valuation in the sport (and possibly all sports if put up for sale) doesn’t turn a profit.

Two weeks ago, Brian Cashman told everyone the Yankees aren’t running it back. At the time, every position player from the Yankees’ last game of last season had been brought back for this season, except for Paul Goldschmidt. Then the Yankees went and brought back Goldschmidt. So now 100 percent of the Yankees’ ALDS position player roster is back for 2026. I wonder if 100 percent is enough for Cashman to admit he did absolutely nothing this offseason.

“You’re starting anew, right?” Aaron Boone wrongly said during his first-day-of-spring-training press conference. “There’s nothing you’re taking with you, ultimately, from last year. It’s all a clean slate.”

What the fuck are you talking about, Boone? You’re literally taking everything with you from last year. The slate couldn’t be dirtier. Opening Day 2026 may as well be Game 170 of 2025.

“There are a lot of the same guys,” Goldschmidt said upon his arrival to spring training.

There are not “a lot of the same guys.” They’re all the same!

Here is the Yankees’ roster of position players from the ALDS:

Cody Bellinger
Jose Caballero
Jazz Chisholm
Jasson Dominguez
J.C. Escarra
Paul Goldschmidt
Trent Grisham
Aaron Judge
Ryan McMahon
Ben Rice
Amed Rosario
Giancarlo Stanton
Anthony Volpe
Austin Wells

Now I will bold the players from that list that are returning this season.

Cody Bellinger
Jose Caballero
Jazz Chisholm
Jasson Dominguez
J.C. Escarra
Paul Goldschmidt
Trent Grisham
Aaron Judge
Ryan McMahon
Ben Rice
Amed Rosario
Giancarlo Stanton
Anthony Volpe
Austin Wells

IT’S THE SAME LIST!

“So if we play well, it’ll be a good thing,” Goldschmidt shared as an all-time observation. “If we don’t, then it’ll probably be the reason that it’s said we didn’t play well.”

The Yankees have one path to a successful season: win the World Series. That’s it. Not just because they’re the Yankees and they haven’t won the World Series in going on 17 years, but because they set themselves up to not just eat crow, but eat a pile of shit if they don’t win the World Series after returning the same roster from last year. Not that the Yankees care about eating shit. When they failed to make the postseason in 2023, their general manager told the media the team he built was “pretty fucking good” after going 82-80, and he only shared that with the media after the organization decided not to hold their annual end-of-season press conference to avoid answering questions about the organization’s worst season in three decades. When the Yankees were embarrassed in the World Series in 2024, they patted themselves on the back just for reaching the World Series, even if their path was solely built on the AL Central. When the Yankees allowed 34 runs in the four-game ALDS loss this past October, they called it a small sample size and talked about their 94 regular-season wins, conveniently forgetting to mention they went 13-25 against the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Tigers, Dodgers and Phillies during that 94-win campaign. Boone called the 2025 team the best roster he has managed, and all he was able to get out of them was an ALDS exit before he was retained for a ninth year. There’s no end to the lengths the Hal Steinbrenner Yankees will go to tell you what you watched isn’t what actually took place and they will do it again this year if their strategy of running it back (again, a strategy they have told us isn’t what they are doing even if 100 percent of the position players are the same) fails.

“We’re running it back,” Jazz Chisholm told reporters on Wednesday as the impending free agent completely disregarded the organizational standpoint that they are in fact not running it back. Then Chisholm went off on one his bizarre, nonsensical tangents about how good the Yankees are — the same kind of nonsense he said last summer and the fall before. “At the halfway point, we thought we built a team that was going to go to the World Series. I don’t see a problem with running it back with four MVPs on your team.”

Chisholm talks like the Yankees have the last few AL and NL MVPs in their lineup and not shells of their MVP-selves except for Aaron Judge. The Yankees’ lineup is still Judge and everyone else, and what that means is it’s Judge and no one else. The Yankees are still a one-man show with a bunch of secondary pieces that can’t survive without that one man. If Judge were to go down for any extended period of time, the season would be over, just like it was in 2023. And the Yankees would have their excuse like they did in 2023, even if no baseball team should be as reliant on one player as the Yankees are with Judge.

The lineup is greatly flawed with a lack of quality right-handed bats and other than Judge having to stay healthy and as good as he has been the last four years is the need for Trent Grisham to replicate his one good major-league season, Stanton to be available and productive and Bellinger to be the player he was in 2025 and not the player the Dodgers non-tendered and the Cubs traded. There is a lot riding on Ben Rice to take the next step in his development and a lot being put on him to possibly be the second-best hitter in the lineup. There is the need for Chisholm to have his best season yet in his walk year and for Jose Caballero to do everything he can early in the season to steal the shortstop job away from Anthony Volpe. Just kidding! That’s never happening, considering the two were supposedly competing for the everyday job in September and Caballero played 18 games and had an .845 OPS and Volpe played 18 games and had a .534 OPS and Volpe still started every postseason game. (The Judge three-run home run in Game 3 of the ALDS was the best moment of the postseason, but the second-best moment was Boone hitting Jasson Dominguez for Volpe in the ninth inning in Game 4 to prevent Volpe from being booed off the field again.) Because we know what Volpe, Austin Wells and Ryan McMahon are offensively, there’s no point in believing any of those three will provide anything other than below-league-average offense. So the Yankees will play with one-third of their lineup being near-automatic outs each game.

“The expectations of this organization, whatever players are here, it’s to win a championship,” Goldschmidt said.

Spoken like someone who has a full year of Yankees media training to his name. Those haven’t been the expectations around here for a long time. If they were, the Yankees would have more than one championship since 2000. The same front office wouldn’t continue to get the opportunity to end the drought and the same manager wouldn’t get a ninth chance to win something other than an abundance of regular-season games against teams that don’t qualify for the postseason. Certainly, the same failed roster wouldn’t get another chance to do what they haven’t been able to do.

Yankees baseball is back and Wednesday was the start of the 2026 season, but let’s not act like it’s truly the start of a “new” season. For now, this season and last season are one and the same.